Big Evernote Desktop Update: Windows and Mac Get Note Links, Note Copying and Much More

Today is a big day for updates. We’re doing a coordinated release of both Evernote for Windows and Evernote for Mac to introduce a bunch of powerful new capabilities that our users have been asking for. Unless noted, the features below are available on both platforms.

Introducing: Note Links

It’s not often that a single feature has the potential to dramatically improve Evernote for all users. It may not seem like much at first, but Note Links is exactly that kind of addition. As the name suggests, Note Links are links to individual notes that can be placed almost anywhere. Create a note link by right clicking on a note and choosing the Copy Note Link option, or choose it from the Note Menu. The link is then placed into your clipboard.

You can paste that link into just about anything—other notes, calendars, to-do lists, third party apps, etc. Whenever you click on the link, it’ll open the note. If you Shift+Click (Windows) or CMD+Click (Mac), it will open the linked note in its own window. We’ve already updated the Web, iOS and Android versions of Evernote to support this feature, so if you click a note link in those environments, it’ll take you to the right place.

Note Links also work in Shared notebooks, allowing notebooks authors to guide visitors through their notebooks.

Multiple Note Links
Select multiple notes, then right click and select Copy Note Links. When you paste them, you’ll get a list of links. This is great for building bibliographies, tables of contents and citations when doing research.

The power of Note Links
Have you ever wanted to create a reminder for a note? Now you can, simply paste the note link into your calendar application. When the reminder pops up, click on the note link and you’re taken to the note. But that’s not all, we expect Note Links to usher in exciting, new applications from our developer community, perfect for our Developer Competition.

Copying notes

You can now make a copy of any of your notes and place those copies wherever you like. You can duplicate a note in a given notebook, you can copy a note into another notebook, you can copy a note from a shared notebook into your account, and vice versa (if the notebook owner allows that).

To copy a note, right click on it, then choose Copy Note (Windows) or Copy to Notebook (Mac).

Create note templates
Note copying gives you the ability to create templates for notes. If you have a specific note layout that’s ideal for, say, gardening or accounting, then make a copy of it. We also give you the option of applying the tags and created date of the original note to the copy.

To do this:

Windows: Right click the note, mouse over Copy Note, then choose Notebook…

Mac: Right click the note, go to the bottom of the notebook list, mouse over Options

Snippet View

If you use Mixed View in your note list, the most obvious change you’ll see is the new Snippet View. Snippets are designed to provide the most useful information possible at a glance. If your note contains only text, then the Snippet will display the text at full width. If the note contains both images and text, then it will show text and a thumbnail. If it’s just an image, then the snippet will show the note title and a larger thumbnail. Not only does this view give you more information about the content of the notes, but it also makes browsing through your notes easier.

Note Browsing History: Back and Forward Buttons

Navigating through your Evernote account just got easier. We’ve added handy forward and back buttons to let you go through your recent note browsing history. It’ll take you to notes you viewed and searches you performed.

Just like in your web browser, if you click and hold on the back or forward arrows, you’ll see a list of things you can jump to, saving you the hassle of extra clicks.

Back and Forward also make navigating through note links a breeze. If you’re in a single note window and click on a note link, the linked note will appear in the same window. To return to the previous note simply click on the back button.

Note Menu

All note-related functions are now neatly displayed in the new Note Menu. Go there to share, copy, move, and more.

Windows: Other enhancements

Here are some Windows-only updates. Mac-only updates follow.

New Exporting Options
By combining Note Links with our HTML export option, we now let you export your notes as separate web pages with a table of contents page all in HTML. It’s like exporting your notes as a compete website. To do this, select the notes you wish to export, then right click and choose Export Notes. Then, select the Export as Multiple Web Pages option.

Additional improvements

Drag and drop: Drag and drop text and images inside a note, to the desktop and to other notes

Disable PDF preview: Right click on a PDF to view it as an attachment instead of a preview

Mac: VoiceOver Accessibility Support

We have improved Evernote’s compatibility with Apple’s VoiceOver accessibility features. You can activate VoiceOver via System Preferences > Universal Access.

More to come

These updates to Evernote for Windows and Evernote for Mac add a ton of great functionality that makes Evernote better for users and provides new capabilities for API developers. Let us know what you think.

Likewise, I find the Snippet view to be almost unusable for text – which is what the majority of my notes are. It’s just a huge block of grayish text. Please restore the bolding of note titles at the very least – and preferably let us control the font size as we can everywhere else. I find it’s now using a larger font size, which is paradoxically less readable as the letter shapes aren’t as clear.

I love this update – note links, back and forward buttons, snippet view…all such great improvements, that I’d either been looking forward to (the first two) or didn’t even know I was missing before I saw it in action (snippet view). Thanks!

One remark, though: the note links work great within evernote, but when I tried pasting one into a note on a toodledo task or a google calendar appointment, they weren’t clickable at all. How are third party applications supposed to know how to handle this evernote:///-stuff?

I don’t know if this helps, but on the mac if I paste the evernote note link into:

Safari: it opens up evernote to the appropriate note
Chrome: it chokes
Firefox: it asks for an application and once I select evernote it works just great.
iCal and others – opens up evernote just fine. I’m guessing this is in part because Safari is my current browser at the moment.

Note links is amazing and great!! But please there – it’s a good and exciting start but it’s far too general to be of use to those of use who already tag extensively. I was hoping for linking to specific areas in a note. That way I can take notes on an article/book and then make specific links to different areas of that note.

I already do this effectively enough with tags. If I’m writing a paper on Napoleon and I have all my sources and notes done what’s the difference (for myself at least) between making a TOC with all the references to the Battle of Waterloo using the links and simply tagging each note with ‘Waterloo’ and clicking the ‘Waterloo’ tag when I want to see them all?

If we can link to certain areas of notes then I can link to all the places that the Battle of Waterloo is mentioned in my notes – not just the note itself, which may have references scattered throughout.

The feature is great if the links are used for other people’s benefit (who are not familiar with Evernote), however, with tools such as tagging and search, the feature is rather redundant in it’s current form.

Good job Evernote! (really, it is a very good start) but please don’t let this be all that linking does.

Note links came in handy for me today. I was able to quickly build a Table of Contents for 9 related notes.

It’s true that I could search for these 9 notes, thanks to my tagging and note titles, but the linking function is great.

I also like how the links can be embedded within a note, for a kind of cross-referencing and hypertext. As a newbie, I found this helpful:
http://elektricforest.com/2011/05/25/visual-note-linking-in-evernote/

I agree with AG, both that links are a good start, and that development shouldn’t stop there. Linking to specific parts of notes (maybe even to bookmarks within PDFs) would make this feature soar to great heights. I use Sciplore freemind mindmapping that imports bookmarks within PDF’s and its a great resource when building up a knowledgebase of principles and facts in a certain field.

But this is a great start, and perhaps third party developers can take it up from here.

will there ever be intra-note links? Then I can build a table of contents at the top of a long list, like so:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0-9
and then jump to the right section of the list by clicking on the relevant letter. This is identical to the concept of HTML intra-page links and anchors.

Nice to see the new items on offer. Just, who left the [Debug] menu on the end after ‘Help’. Windows version (XP). Really has a lot of unflattering, error loops in there. Had to kill the process after selecting ‘Test Feature’, or ‘Walk Message Boxes’.

I know, I shouldn’t click on what I don’t understand. It’s a weakness.

I love the Note Links feature because it’s as if my favorite application from Mac days of yore — Hypercard — has returned from the dead more powerful than ever. You young’uns can go Google that if you don’t know what it is.

I love Evernote and use it constantly, just wish that the Check box would be searchable. That would make this one of the only tools I need.
I keep my minutes and meeting notes and it would help to be able to know of things I still need to do

I’m just a regular Evernote user, but I think that feature already exists. If you look at the sidebar where you can select looking at your notebooks, tags, or saved searches there is the very bottom one called attributes. If you click that then Contains you have the option of displaying To-do items, unfinished to do items and/or finished to do items (ie. checked/unchecked to do boxes). Unless you use Windows and it’s totally different from Mac for some reason this should be what you’re looking for.

Great job! Evernote had already replaced onenote in my life, but this update places evernote way ahead of all competitors. I recommend evernote to my peers often. As a matter of fact, I’m currently in Dominican Republic encouraging a missionary to download it.

Many, many thanks to Evernote for listening to your user community. Note Links and Copy Note are two great features that we have been requesting for a very long time.

As Andrew stated at the beginning of the blog:
“It’s not often that a single feature has the potential to dramatically improve Evernote for all users. It may not seem like much at first, but Note Links is exactly that kind of addition.”

You guys are terrific! You just continue to make Evernote better and better, and provide updates at frequency like no other software manufacturer.

Not having any luck with copy note links into address bar of Chrome or Safari (running Snow Leopard 10.6.7) . Does nothing when I press enter. If I put it in an email using Mail and send it to myself, it opens my desktop Evernote. What would it open on someone else’s email?

Note linking is great – a feature I’ve been wishing for since I stopped using Journler a couple of years ago. Journler allowed you to make bookmarks for favorite notes so they were always handy. So far as I know Evernote doesn’t allow you to do the same thing, but note links allow a hack to make something similar:
1. Create a new Notebook with a name that makes it live at the top of the stack for easy access (I called mine **Bookmarks)
2. Add a new note in that. Imaginatively, I also called that Bookmarks.
3. Paste any links you want to in that.

Voila, you now have an easy-to-scan list of frequently accessed notes. Strictly speaking it’s not any fewer steps perhaps, but generally quicker.

Great update thank you very much. Have tried dragging text to the desktop and it does not work, but you can drag a note to the desktop. I was able to post a note link into outlook calendar 2007 no problem. Have recommended Evernote to anybody who is prepared to listen to me.

seems like some glitch. note links if copied within a new note or another note etc within evernote works fine. but if note link copied and then try opening in browser, not working; if copy one or more note links and create a new note in evernote, within en, it works, but if shared via email, links disappear, same if just copying one more note links into email and sending it…

This is fantastic.I am just in the process of migrating completely to Evernote (with Egretlist) for all my to-do lists and reference material. The one part that I was concerned about was linking notes together, which I was planning to do with tags. I am really looking forward to experimenting with the new note linking functionality. This couldn’t be more timely. Well done again guys.

I do like Evernote, but I dislike the new Snippet View, for me I need my note panel on the right, but now I can only see 9 notes at a time. This just made it harder to browse through my notes. What I would really love is the option to have the list view show the note panel on the right instead of the bottom. Good job with the Note Links feature.

I have been using Evernote since 2.2, I still miss it even though it was a real pain to sync notes to different machines. Thank you for bringing back copy notes and note links, they were really missed. I’ve been using the new incarnation since the advent of 3.5; Replacing a bricked laptop and discovering my old friend (Evernote 2.2) won’t work with Vista (Spits) was the impetus and now I have it on every device, XPHome Desktop, Vista Laptop, XPHome NetBook, Blackberry and Android Smartphone. I use it to track ideas, projects, letter plans, keep track of my E-Bay history, buying and selling and prospective purchases big and small.I can take a photo and in the blink of an eye it is in my note book and available to me anywhere. This new release is a great improvement and on Vista (Spit) seems to to be much more stable. This software makes my life easier with every update, thank you.

Ps. Please make a version for Linux, My Laptop is just middling with Vista (Spit). On Linux it rocks, if you made a version for Linux I could junk Vista (Spit) once and for all. I would be so Happy if you could; please, please pretty please.

@Baz, @Vlad, @Andrew Jones:
There is actually a version some 3rd party programmer made for linux. It is called Nevernote (nevernote.sourceforge.net). It isn’t very good, but if you don’t need to do ink notes, I have found that it suffices.

I think it is already in the Ubuntu repository if you want to use apt-get.

One thing that bugs me is that when adding a tag on a note and start typing, it only brings out 10 of the existing tags to select. Thats major issue for me. When evernote was bringing ALL the tags in the drop down, I had my tags organized staring with a number depending on the type of tag I wanted to use. For example 1…. was reserved for company (e.g. 1.Company1. 1.Company2 ), 2…. was reserved for project name and so on. So when creating a note, all I had to do was to press 1 to 9 and all my notes where categorized within seconds.

Would love it if there was at least an option to get all the tags in the drop down when entering tags ( on clippers too )

Awesome, you guys are the best! Thank you thank you! Note linking is great – dumb question – is there a way to link while editing a note – eg some kind of fancy markup or right click option when highlighting some text?

@Martin If I understand what you mean, you can get this fone with nested tags. For example, with a tag hierarchy where Tag1 is the parent and Tag2, Tag3… are the child tags, clicking on Tag1 will filter all notes in the hierarchy. Just make sure “All Notes” in the notebook list is selected.

Love the (multiple) note links, and also the added drag and drop features.

BUT: Note links work in Evernote, but outside of it I only managed to use them in Firefox and Open Office documents. Doesn’t work in Chrome, Thunderbird, or the calendar extensions for Thunderbird.

Is there a list of applications that acutally work with the note-link? Workarounds or extensions for Chrome / Thunderbird?

I’m really really really waiting for EN to have a working calendar integration.

Also, as I have written many times: the email functionality with Everernote for Windows is really sub par. It is an annoyance and greatly hinders my workflow. C’m on Evernote, this has been MUCH BETTER in the 2.X versions. See how long I’ve been asking to fix this?

Note links seem useless outside evernote. pastes something like
evernote:///view/1076238/s9/a13c75cf-dd04-4160-a10f-20c789852fca/a13c75cf-dd04-4160-a10f-20c789852fca/
in any other program, is not clickable and can only be opened through context menu commands in some programs. Works in outlook, but not in google apps, so if no cloud functionality, what’s the point?

Ugh. The new Snippets view is overwhelming my page. I tried to make the font of the Title smaller but the Preferences settings didn’t seem to have any effect on the Snippets view. And how do I hide the date? I should have the option to display it or not. The date is not important to me in Snippet view and it takes up valuable characters.

Sounds great, but under Windows shouldn’t the installation update the registry so that the protocol (hence the link) is associated with the Evernote program? It does not. (I’m using 4.4.1.4892)

For example, I would love to put a link IN EndNote (which I use for bibliography management) TO an Evernote note (where I keep my notes). Sadly, clicking on the link does not switch to Evernote in the right place.

I’m happy to have the updates. But there’s a huge missing functionality I will sorely miss, unless there’s an option to turn it on: The “empty note” at the bottom of the notes panel. It not only beckons you to click on it and add whatever you want, but it’s virtually an already existing, ready-to-use blank note.

If this functionality has gone away, you have increased the number of steps to create a new note (from 1 clicks to 2 clicks) and a big piece of the interactive appeal of the UI.

Maybe part of Evernote’s goals is to decrease the overall amount of notes people are adding. That doesn’t make sense.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for bringing back note links. As you know, many of us Evernote old-timers have been awaiting its resurrection. Thank you so much.
— Hardcore Evernote User
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Mac X
iphone

These are nice. Oddly, I’ve never wanted note linking, but I can see how it could be useful.

What I want is document linking. Now Evernote allows you to copy a document into a note. I can see how that would be useful for some but not for me. I want to drag document and directory shortcuts into an Evernote but this doesn’t seem to work.

For example, I work on many different projects. Each one has a bunch of different Word, Excel, documents and email folders associated with it. I want to create a note for each project and copy the the relevant document, directory and email folder shortcuts into the Evernote so that when I want to work on that project I just click on all the relevant shortcuts and, boom, my project is open again.

If this is possible I’ve never figured out how to do it? If not, please add this feature in the future.

Note linking is great. Thanks! I’m a writer and for a long time I’ve wanted a way to drop a link to a note in Evernote into my in-process Word documents. This makes all the difference to me in Evernote being useful for my projects.

I was pretty excited about Note Links when I listened to the podcast recently. So far it’s been great for keeping checklists together without having everything all in the same list.

Example: One of the things in a to-do list for this week is prep for a cycling event that’s coming up. So, the “Prep for event” item includes a link to the separate note that’s the checklist for the event.

This way, I’m not looking at my grocery list or “water the plants” along with the bike specific stuff. I could also see the note links working really well to support an Evernote GTD setup.

I also kindly praise for a Linux version, too; or at least make it possible from Android. I would like to link the repertoire of my band to notes containing the partitures, but being a Linux user I just can’t.

I used Evernote for several months, then moved over to Springpad because it offered reminder & due dates. I wanted to switch back to Evernote when I read about the note linking addition; however, notes don’t link to gmail/gcal. Really bummed. Will this be fixed? I’d love to make the switch back!

This is great! I use evernote to track research projects, and keep notes. The note links is excellent for moving from “overall view” of the project to the “task list” for smaller parts. I didn’t even realize how much I needed note links until they were announced!! Thanks evernote!!

I see you can create a link to an evernote:/// app but not a mailplane:// app link. That’s a bummer because mailplane linking is already implemented by clicking on the “what created this note link” in the upper left. However, if I have a note that I want to store a few links to multiple emails you can’t do it easily. You can store the mailplane URL in plain text then right click and go to services and then “open url”. Please support the mailplane:// protocol in the new link pop up!!!!! Thanks!!!

I Just discovered why the forward/back buttons weren’t working for me. I have a few key notebooks that begin with an underscore to keep them at the top of the stacks (such as _inbox, etc), so I thought maybe the underscore was the culprit after searching through Evernote support pages and finding this article on how it’s supposed to work. Sure enough, I changed the name of my underscore notebooks to a period instead (.inbox), and now the forward/back buttons work as expected. Just thought I’d share incase anyone else ran into a similar situation.

Evernote is such a great product – and it just gets better and better with each new release, and as I discover new ways of using it. Thanks Evernote Team!

I am using Mac in English. However, I found out if the note I am copying has its title in a double-byte language (Traditional Chinese), the note link I copied to a third-party app will become ASCII codes.

I would like to commend evernote by saying how much I love it. I use it on my galaxy note 3 which I got a free 12 months of premium along with my Samsung pproduct. This is a long lol amazing but it would be even more outstanding to have the note link functionality on my application. Emphasis on the word OUTSTANDING lol. Thank you evernote for reading and applying this suggestion,
Wink wink.